Intel Core i5-3427U: Ivy Bridge For Ultrabooks

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Introductions and Specifications

Back in 2011, Intel Capital, Intel's investment arm in support of their strategic objectives, ponied-up a cool $300 million to help give birth to a new class of notebooks called "Ultrabooks." Though there isn't a complete set of design specifications, Intel requires certain characteristics of performance, mechanical design, battery life and processor component selection, in order to market a notebook as an Ultrabook. From resume from hibernation response times to chassis thickness, Intel wanted to build upon Apple's success with the MacBook Air, so that all of their OEM and ODM partners could get in on the thin, sleek and sexy trend that's all the rage with consumers. And of course Intel would also be continuously investing in processor technology to further the Ultrabook initiative.

Today Intel is lifting the embargo veil off of a number of Core i5 Ivy Bridge processors for both the desktop and mobile segments. In terms of mobile products, Ultrabooks remain the clear focus for Intel, and as such, we've been setup with a demonstration vehicle for the new Core i5-3427U Ultra mobile processor that Intel is launching today, along with a few other SKUs for these super thin and light notebooks. Make sure to check out our coverage of the new 3rd generation Core i5 Ivy Bridge desktop processors here, but what follows is a look at Intel's latest Ultrabook vision and the shape of things to come in no-compromise, highly mobile computing according to Intel.

2 Core and Four-Way Multi Task Processing: 4-way multi-task processing allows each core of the processor to work on two tasks at the same time.

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0: Dynamically increases the processor frequency up to 2.60GHz when applications demand more performance giving you speed when you need it, energy efficiency when you don’t.

Intel® Secure Key: a HW assist processor technology designed to produce high-quality, high-security, high-volume random numbers through an on-chip entropy source that can be used for various security computing demands, such as Intel’s own Identity Protection Technology, IPT.

The Intel Core i5-3427U processor we'll be testing today is a midrange CPU with a 17 Watt TDP (Thermal Power Design). This chip has a base clock speed of 1.8GHz with a Turbo Boost speed of 2.6GHz in multithreaded workloads and 2.8GHz in single-threaded operation. As you can see, in this new class of Ivy Bridge Ultra Low Voltage CPUs, Intel is offering top-end clock speeds of 3GHz with a low-end of 1.7GHz. Intel HD 4000 graphics core speeds are scaled back from their quad-core counterparts to 350MHz/1150MHz in the chip we tested, which is only 100MHz or so slower at max dynamic frequency.

We've given you detail on both the Ivy Bridge core architecture and mobile architecture in our previous coverage last month, so we won't go into it in depth again here. We will, however, take a detailed look at what Intel has in store for their new "Chief River" Ultrabook, Centrino platform features as well as the prototype Ultrabook they sent us for testing.